3 Things We Learned About Music Systems From The Creator of HitsLab

Ievgen Poltavskyi has quietly built one of the most-used music catalogs in the creator economy. We asked him what’s actually changing and what most people in the industry are getting wrong.

In under two years, HitsLab tracks have been applied across tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, Reels, and Shorts with the catalog reaching millions of downloads without a single dollar spent on advertising. His focus is entirely on what he describes as “music ecosystems for creators”: catalogs engineered for use instead of listening.

We sat down with Poltavskyi to understand how he thinks about the space. Here are five things that stood out.

1. The stock music market has already gone through two eras and most platforms are still stuck in the second one.

Poltavskyi breaks the evolution of music licensing into three distinct phases. The first was per-track licensing: one track, one fee, one use. It made sense when content was scarce, but it collapsed under the weight of exponential publishing volumes.

The second phase – subscription – lowered the entry barrier but kept structural friction in place: download caps, attribution rules, catalog restrictions. “Subscription solved the price problem,” Poltavskyi says. “It didn’t solve the speed problem. And speed is what the creator economy actually runs on.”

The third phase, the one he’s building for, is free access. Not free as a promotional gimmick, but free as an infrastructure standard. “When creators are producing dozens of pieces of content a month, access becomes the baseline expectation,” he says. “Platforms like Pixabay proved that removing barriers doesn’t destroy value, we actually have the proof that it accelerates how fast things spread”

2. AI won’t replace music, but it will decide who finds it.

Poltavskyi is notably uninterested in the AI-generated music debate. What he’s watching closely is AI-driven discovery and he thinks most platforms are underestimating how fast it will reshape the landscape.

“In the near future, the competition won’t be between catalogs,” he says. “It’ll be between user experiences. Creators already choose the path with the least resistance, and AI-powered search will only sharpen that instinct. Algorithms will route people toward wherever they get a usable result fastest.”

The implication is significant: discoverability will increasingly favor platforms built around practical value and minimal friction, not the ones with the deepest back catalogs or the most editorial curation. “Music is starting to follow the same logic as every other digital tool,” Poltavskyi adds. 

3. Repeat usage is more important than virality as the metric that actually matters.

This might be Poltavskyi’s sharpest break from conventional industry thinking. Where most of the music business still orbits around the hit – he argues the economics have flipped.

“Going viral means one burst of attention that fades as fast as it arrived,” he notes. “But if a track is genuinely useful, it gets picked up across thousands of unconnected projects without anyone orchestrating it. People grab it because it fits. And unlike hype-driven plays, that kind of usage just keeps building on itself.”

He’s pointing out that the creator economy, by its nature, rewards consistency over spectacle. When content production is continuous, the music that survives is the music that’s repeatable. “The value of a track is shifting,” Poltavskyi says. “It’s less about how many people pressed play and more about how many times it got dragged into a timeline.”

Poltavskyi sees all of this as part of a broader shift that’s already played out in software and media: the transition from ownership to access. Music, in his view, is simply the latest domain to cross that threshold.

“This space isn’t cooling off and the growth curve is steepening,” he states. “Every supporting infrastructure has to evolve just as fast, music included. Whoever can reliably deliver legally clean, and fast solutions will become essential. Those who can’t will scramble for whatever market share remains.”

It’s a confident read on the market – but then, his success is suggesting he might be right.